This is Amor's guitar - I like the haphazard way he put on the strings...

This is my dog, Oso, who lives on my parents' property. I think he looks really scary here. Lately, he's been playing with this piece of green carpet - he drags it around with him and whips it around in his mouth and growls. He had no problem with me taking it away from him, he wasn't possessive of it. Still, I will never, ever feel completely comfortable with this dog, because he is a Rotty. I still love him to pieces, though.

My dad and sister - they're looking at a photo album.

Rita's hubby making gorditas. They didn't turn out all that great - he says you have to fry them in oil. My Grandma Ama never fried them....and they were great. You cut them open and slathered butter inside.

Here's my mom - she's so happy. We're trying to get her advance directives together, while she can still comprehend what that is. It makes me so sad, I don't like to think about it. She is forgetting things more and more lately, and doing weird things here and there. Most of it is just funny and amusing, now anyways. In the future, I don't see these things as being very comical much longer. It's like, I'm 33, I'm not supposed to be dealing with a parent with dementia....but I am. My whole family is....She was just so happy to have her daughters there for Christmas. Two out of three, anyway.

I know this shot is blurry, but I like it anyway. We're at Rita's hubby's family's house. They are all Hispanic and it's just insane. We played this game called Spoons where you have 4 playing cards, and when you get 4 of a kind, you grab a spoon, and then everyone else is then allowed to grab a spoon. Only, there aren't enough spoons to go around, and whoever doesn't have a spoon gets a letter (like an H, and has to play to the word HORSE). It got really nuts, we were all drinking Pina Coladas, Crown & Coke, Jack & Coke, Budweiser....I got injured, as did a few other people. When you're going for those spoons, shit, you are out for BLOOD!

One of Rita's nieces, eating a mollete, so cute! It's as big as her head!

And, of course, some videos.

Here's us driving into SA.

We helped my sister move Christmas Eve.

And here, we see Rita playing tennis for the first time on the Wii.

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Additionally, here are things that have been ping-ponging around my head lately.

1. Paula Dean is cool. I watched her InnerView with Ernie Manouse Thursday and man, is she interesting. I used to like her a lot in the past because she used so much frickin butter in her recipes, and she wasn't afraid of food, she used her hands to mix things a lot, she just got dirty, and that's just great. (That's why I always hated watching Marth Stewart cook, she never wanted to get dirty. Ugh, it drove me bananas when I watched her show, years ago.)

2. David Bowie is cool. We just acquired the Buddha of Suburbia (the 2007 re-release of his 1993 album) which came right before Outside. It's so good. For three days I've had only Bowie songs on the iTunes, playing all his songs on random. There's about 130 of them, and I don't even own all his albums.

3. I think I'm pretty much out of my "insane" phase. This past year, I've struggled and worked and worked on bettering myself, shedding myself of some panic-tendencies, negativity, etc. It sucks that I deleted all that time from my diary, but oh well. I'm an idiot for deleting, what can I say? I have it all printed out, though, so I could go back and read, but YOU can't. I don't know what else to describe it as except for when I felt "insane", because that is how I felt. I tried drugs (prescribed), alcohol (self-prescribed), but those things don't work. I attribute my ascent up to being more uplifted & happy to my hubby being a fucking KICK ASS human being, lover, friend; Bikram yoga and riding my bike to Austin last April. Life's a struggle. It's great to have someone by my side. Now I can be by HIS side as he goes through the joys of finishing grad school - the timing is amazing. There's no way in fucking HELL that I'd be as understanding as I am if I hadn't gone through it myself. Life is cool, no? Fucking weird sometimes, but cool.

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